Tracking Sandwich Eaters

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Here's the scandal du jour from Hollywood, with evidence two years late. (But better late than never -- and the whole thing is still delicious anyway because it gives us a rare, raw, unedited, firsthand view of the ways of Hollywood and the conflicts of interests that always arise in collaborative art-making.) While filming 2004's I Heart Huckabees (IMDB information here), the fabulously talented Lily Tomlin breaks out her frustration over the erratic filmmaking of David O. Russell, who then throws a giant tantrum. The videos first appeared in YouTube (where else?) where they created a giant stir, then got pulled out by the poster, only to have the vacuum filled by others who made bootleg copies. Here's the first clip, and here's the second clip, and here's what people are saying in the IMDB message board. It's sad and funny all at the same time. My heart entirely goes for Lily. Russell may be a talented director (Three Kings, Flirting With Disaster, and my favorite incest movie of all time, Spanking the Monkey), but he's work ethic -- legendary for his anger management problems that included George Clooney once reportedly taking aim at him during a tussle while filming Three Kings -- is the very equivalent of hellish ineptness.

[Defamer has a good post about the whole incident, complete with excerpts from the Sharon Waxman article from The New York Times that first talked about it. It also has an interview with Tomlin who can laugh about the whole thing now. "Oh my God, the one in the car is on there too?" Tomlin asked.]

Seriously though, this should give us pause over how technology has so overtaken our lives that there really is no such thing as secrecy or privacy anymore. Hell, even the latest issue of Uno Magazine has a feature (ineptly-written) about how to deal with the increasingly instances of personal video sex scandals, with the salacious evidence posted online from lost cellphones. (It's supposed to be a "how-to" article without any "how-to's" in it. What a sad excuse for a men's magazine, all the more dead with its curious dude-speak writing style.)